• teft@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Anyway, apparently Bethesda hasn’t been too dissuaded by the lukewarm reception its space sim got. Pagliarulo says it’s now joined Fallout and Elder Scrolls on the podium as one of Bethesda’s "big three”.

    What a bunch of fucking clowns. Smoked too much copium it looks like.

  • Omega@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    “This is, of course, a slightly wild thing for the studio that made Morrowind (its actual best game) and Skyrim (its most popular game by miles) to say”

    Accurate

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          1 month ago

          FO3 did some thing much better than NV. NV is the best written, by far, but it’s different, not better, for gameplay. FO3 was closer to the original games in gameplay. There were a lot more random events while traveling, and they could react with each other in really unique ways. NV essentially removed this. There are a lot of other areas of difference too, but NV always gets remembered as better, and I think that’s largely because the things FO3 did better are systemic, so less noticeable, while NV had better stories, which you have to notice.

          • And009@reddthat.com
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            1 month ago

            I always get lost in the randomness of Bethesda. NV was the only one with a storyline I could recall tbh.

            Don’t know if I actually finished vanilla Skyrim

  • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Emil, Howard, and Hines are why Bethesda can’t make good games anymore. Corporate hacks that have pushed for more mundane gameplay with every new game.

    They also spearheaded piecemeal DLCs and consistently try to find ways to monetize mods.

    • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      In August 2023, Todd Howard described his intent behind The Elder Scrolls VI as wanting to make “the ultimate fantasy-world simulator”,

      That’s when you should have known. TES is at heart a novelistic series that is owned by a studio whose entire style is now “short term crafting and gameplay loops occurring within a physics simulation”.

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        The same could be said of Skyrim, but tons of people loved it and it’s still a great framework for modding if Bethesda themselves don’t give it a good storyline.

        • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 month ago

          Skyrim had a narrative, it had stories that raised curiosity enough to engage with the gameplay loops. Some of the side quest were even pretty good, the main quest was meh.

          Increasingly Bethesda seems to be building their games around gameplay loops with narrative increasingly ancillary. They’ve optimized for grind without giving a reason to grind.

        • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Quite so, but I’ll be damned if fans are ever going to redo TES6 in whatever engine they make for (god forbid) TES10, forty years from now.

    • arefx@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      This has been obvious for a few years now. I used to get shit on for voicing this opinion a couple years ago and now it seems almost universally agreed upon. Bethesda is truly shit now.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    Tons of people still play Skyrim.

    Something tells me that, in 10 years, few if any will still be playing Starfield.

      • olicvb@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        According to SteamDB: [edit:Starfield has] around 10k every day which is about the same as Hogwarts Legacy, Bloons TD6, and No man’s Sky

        • Grumpy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Which version is that? The original Skyrim (aka oldrim) isn’t even purchasable on steam and hidden unless you bought it back then. But some people still play that because some old mods only support oldrim.

          Special edition is the main one now. It’s holding 30k very steadily since 2020 https://steamdb.info/app/489830/charts/#breakdown

          Many of modders also moved to gog version, myself included. Because I can permanently version control on gog unlike stream.

          • olicvb@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            I was talking about Starfield (i get how my comment isn’t precise in that way now, i’ll add an edit… oops)

            • pyre@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              the original deus ex is a masterpiece. you should be playing that every other year minimum. what the fuck kind of interpretation is that.

                • pyre@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  I don’t have vr but if anything justified having it, it would be to immerse yourself in the world of deus ex.

                  arkane’s prey would be nice too.

          • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            Why? It has one of the biggest modding communities in gaming, so there’s a lot for people to like about it still, assuming they’re fine with modding it.

            • pyre@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              because it’s slop. there are so many more games to play that have better writing, direction, characters, environments, exploration, combat, RPG elements, and overall design.

              I don’t get Bethesda fans insisting on modding bland ass games. you can play a game that’s better to begin with.

                • pyre@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  I didn’t say it’s wrong, I said it’s sad. also star field is objectively the sloppiest slop game even coming from the slop masters that are bethesda game studios. literally nothing about the game is remarkable.

                  while skyrim had a mediocre story handled badly and annoying af characters, it was at least carried by great environmental design and some memorable side quests, which is to say it greatly rewarded exploration.

                  the one real strength of their open worlds, and they threw that in the garbage to instead add fishbowls of minimally randomized and endlessly repeated slop separated by untold amounts of loading screens, tedious inventory management, and empty space where you do nothing but run in one direction. because there isn’t even anything you can encounter between points of interests so you don’t even explore.

                  yes, it is slop. and it is sad that people are playing that game for the sake of justifying their ovehyped purchase rather than playing better games which is almost any other game you have heard of.

      • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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        1 month ago

        I played 100 hours of Starfield. I dont remember much of it to be honest, nor am I interested in going back.

        And yet I picked up Elden Ring back up like half a dozen times since release.

      • Magiilaro@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        I have started a complete new game 2 days ago and have again a lot of fun with Starfield. Can’t wait to see all the new content from the DLC.

        I would say that Starfield is the best NASA punk planet exploration RPG Bethesda has ever made

          • Magiilaro@feddit.org
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            1 month ago

            I never said it is the best game they ever made, but it is the best NASA punk space RPG they ever made 😁

          • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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            1 month ago

            I wish I could say that. I played Daggerfall and I spent 4 hours in the tutorial dungeon. And in the game, if I wasnt dying, then the game was crashing.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I don’t play FO4 anymore either. I will say I appreciate the stories, but their attempts to make games you can live in just don’t measure up anymore. Not when you have games like no man’s land and satisfactory. We know just how comfy a game can be.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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        1 month ago

        I mean, I do, to see what new mods are out.

        Gun modding is an absolute shit show btw. Everyone tries to make their guns use the real or unique calibers and it’s kind of a massive pain.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      1 month ago

      Yeah.

      It’s so depressing.

      Like you telling me out of 250 developers on Starfield, nobody is losing their shit that this project isnt at all critically acclaimed like many of their other releases?

  • ngwoo@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This is the attitude that forced Blizzard to rework everything about themselves, caused FFXIV to launch in a disastrous state, and made Concord

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Yeah this new stock of devs just don’t have it in them to deliver anything great. Their values and language likely prevent them from even considering something more visceral. Wouldn’t be surprised if most of them have lived such uninteresting lives they have nothing to draw from. That’s at least what they write like.

      Seems they don’t know why their hero kills, they don’t believe in the culling the player enacts. They’d probably rather he didn’t.

      They seem like they’d prefer to make Animal Crossing in space, they don’t really want to write about empire, conquest, terrible crimes, deep-seated hate. Ending threats.

      They don’t even want to know how the tools of the trade work. Just look at the animations for the models, you can tell that whoever worked on then feared being put on an FBI watchlist if they looked up a video on how pump action shotguns work.

      These kinds of dev teams are fully incapable of writing good villains and a cast of characters with wildly different moralities that are grounded in something real.

      They’re not interested in combat games. They shouldn’t touch them. They should leave and make room for those who want to.

      • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        What are you on about? Almost every top person working on Starfield has been there since the days of Oblivion/Fallout 3. Bethesda in general is known for high retention, there’s a lot of the old guard there.

        If anything you should be complaining that there’s not enough new blood in Bethesda.

  • Codex@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I’d wait to see if fans are still trying to port Starfield to new engines in 20 years before I start talking about my company’s “best” work.

  • BertramDitore@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. I played, and I even enjoyed big parts of it (after heavily modding, to be fair). I think it got more hate than it deserved, but in no reality can it be considered a really good game, let alone their best.

    • Mayor Poopington@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I really enjoyed the story missions, but the procedurally generated stuff got old fast. Im going to give a few years when all the DLCs are out and someone gives is the Wildlander treatment.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        What they needed was a lot less empty planets and a lot more that looked populated (not occupied by a small outpost; populated, by a civilization).

        The beauty of Skyrim (and I guess fallout, though I hated the guns so much I struggled to ever get into it) was that you could just wander if you got bored. You’d just point yourself in a random direction and see what popped out as interesting. Many of those places would be moderate sized cave systems that brought you out somewhere completely different, where you were free, again, to just pick a direction and explore.

        It doesn’t feel like exploration to go to an empty map with a base that you kill everything in, then backtrack back to your ship every time.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I wanted to get into outpost building in Starfield but I just can’t get past the question, why am I doing it? Everything is needlessly gated three times over and I don’t get any utility or story out of it.

        • fulg@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          You’d just point yourself in a random direction and see what popped out as interesting.

          Fallout 3 was the same, and I loved this so much. Somehow they failed to keep this up with 4 (I never played 76).

          I guess they felt like worlds you were a part of, rather than the center of. So many things to discover!

  • vga@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    And Rings of Power is the best Tolkien adaptation.

  • boaratio@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I like starfield. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I think the amount of shit it gets is unwarranted.

    • heavy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I agree with you, while adding that the lack of depth, especially in space exploration, economy and combat made it that much more disappointing. Like the groundwork is there, you should be able to hire pilots or have you companions run planet bases for you, but no. At least, when I played you couldn’t do that.

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        1 month ago

        I’m a big sci-fi nerd, and the primary quest was so, so good in my opinion. I tried out the base building feature and it really felt worthless, but the combat and story are so really fun.

    • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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      I was thinking the other day that people were bashing it for the space navigation and I remembered that Mass Effect didn’t let you pilot shit or even pick where to go or explore a huge planet and still was so so good.

      Still not attracted because what ME was an engrossing story and amazing cast, which Bethesda never ever did in any of the games I liked. So… yeah.

      But I sure hope people who took the plunge will get their money’s worth!

    • arefx@lemmy.ml
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      I don’t know I read comments like this and can only think you haven’t played too many games…

    • BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      100% agree, there’s lots to love. I admit that it has a lot of failings and they totally over promised what the game was going to be. But the way people talk you’d think it was an actual bad game.

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        So what do you like about it and what do you dislike about it? I haven’t tried it yet, might pick it up when it costs about as much as a hamburger with fries, but probably not before.

        • BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I think a lot of the quests are still great, while I think the writing generally is worse it’s not bad. I’ve spent hours building ships, I really like just jumping around system to system not even landing. I would say there’s a higher ratio of non combat options which I enjoy. You can spend a long time just running around talking to people- which for some is a negative, I love my RPGs roll play heavy over combat

      • BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        90% of it is people who never played the game and just love shitting on bethesda

        its quite like the hate kirk cousins gets, its usually from people who dont watch him play

    • SuspiciousCatThing@pawb.social
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      1 month ago

      Yes! I love Starfield. I don’t know if the hate is partially band wagon or meme or what, but I absolutely don’t get it. The main complaint I’ve seen is that it’s boring. I really just don’t feel that. It’s open and self-motivated to me in the same way New Vegas or Morrowind are. I personally think that’s great.

    • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      It’s a tale as old as the game industry itself: The company releases an okay game, everyone goes “hell yeah, a solid 7/10”. …except by now everyone expects the company to make nothing but absolute masterpieces.

      It’s an okay game with lots of little janky bits I don’t like (surprising in sense that I of course expected there to be some jank, this is Bethesda we’re talking about). The game seems to be amusing enough that I enjoy my time while playing it, but it doesn’t have the magic sauce that would make me eagerly get back to the game the next day.

  • shani66@ani.social
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    1 month ago

    Even disregarding just how bad starfield is, Emil is the literal worst person to say this. He is completely, shockingly incompetent when it comes to his job.